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Arvind Subramanian is a senior fellow (on leave) at the Center for Global Development. He is the chief economic advisor to the government of India.

Greenprint: A New Approach to Cooperation on Climate Change, written with Aaditya Mattoo, was published by CGD in 2012; Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China's Economic Dominance was published in September 2011. Foreign Policy named him one of the world's top 100 global thinkers in 2011. India Today magazine named him one of India’s top 35 “Masters of the Mind” over the last 35 years.

He has written on growth, trade, development, institutions, aid, oil, India, China, Africa, and the World Trade Organization. He has published widely in academic and other journals, including the American Economic Review (Papers and Proceedings), Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Monetary Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Economic Growth, Journal of Development Economics, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, International Monetary Fund Staff Papers, Foreign Affairs, World Economy, and Economic and Political Weekly. He is currently ranked among the top 2 percent of the world’s academic economists in terms of citations of academic research, according to the widely used REPEC rankings.

He has also published or been cited in leading magazines and newspapers, including the Economist, Financial Times, Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and New York Review of Books. He contributes frequently to the Financial Times and is a columnist for India's leading financial daily, Business Standard.

He advises the Indian government in different capacities, including as a member of the Finance Minister's Expert Group on the G-20. Subramanian was assistant director in the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund. He served at the GATT (1988–92) during the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations and taught at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government (1999–2000) and at Johns Hopkins' School for Advanced International Studies (2008–10).

He obtained his undergraduate degree from St. Stephens College, Delhi; his MBA from the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, India; and his M.Phil. and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford, UK.

“Aid and Growth: What Does the Cross-Section Evidence Really Show?” National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper, No. 11513, (with Raghuram Rajan), 2005; forthcoming Review of Economics and Statistics.

High-res photo

More From Arvind Subramanian

Is the world making progress on climate change? Recently, the OECD struck a hopeful note, reporting that emissions were growing more slowly than GDP in both the high-income and developing countries, including China. This decoupling of emissions and growth, if true, would be good news indeed, since it would suggest that the world can cut emissions without hurting the economic growth needed to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

The threat of climate change can only be averted with genuine cooperation between traditional and emerging powers. However, the profound changes in the economic and fiscal situations of the high-income countries, on one hand, and the rapidly-growing emerging powers such as India and China, on the other, have great implications for the potential for climate cooperation. In their new book, Greenprint: A New Approach to Cooperation on Climate Change, Aaditya Mattoo and Arvind Subramanian offer a new perspective on the climate change discourse. They outline the framework for the collaborative international effort needed to meet this challenge, calling for the big emerging market countries such as China, Brazil, and India to lead the charge for climate change action, as well as a renewed focus on innovation.

In his widely-acclaimed 2011 book Origins of Political Order, Fukuyama explores the divergent trajectory of political and institutional development across societies. His new CGD Working Paper "What is Governance?" presents a framework for quantifying governance across countries. As part of the Understanding India Series, Fukuyama will contrast the evolution of political institutions in India and China.

In some ways, both India and China defy—in almost opposite ways – the general pattern of higher incomes being associated with more democratic institutions: India has sustained democracy at very low levels of income and Chinese political institutions are defying the modernization hypothesis. Fukuyama will discuss these issues and the application of his new framework for quantifying governance in China and India.

*This seminar series is organized by CGD's Understanding India initiative, which explores India's development challenges and experiences and the lessons they might offer for other developing countries.

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The authors suggest a new approach assessing carbon taxes on imports to address the concerns from high-income countries about the effect of taxes on competition without damaging trade from developing countries.

Until recently, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been an effective framework for cooperation because it has continually adapted to changing economic realities. The current Doha Agenda is an aberration because it does not reflect one of the biggest shifts in the international economic and trading system: the rise of China.

Arvind Subramanian testified before the Joint Economic Committee at a hearing titled “Manufacturing in the USA: How Trade Policy Offshores Jobs” on September 21, 2011. Subramanian’s testimony focused on the US-China trade relationship.

This post also appears on the Peterson Institute for International Economics Real Time Economics Watch.

In Lord Richard Attenborough’s movie Gandhi, an underling of the British Empire heatedly warns his supercilious boss that Mahatma Gandhi’s impending protest march to the sea poses a far greater threat than the Raj realizes: “Salt, sir, is a symbol.” This elicits the memorable sneering put-down from the boss (played by Sir John Gielgud): “Don’t patronize me, Charles.”